How the FBI cracked a “sextortion” plot against pro poker players

"We don't just fly out here and kick in your door knowing only a little."

At 8:05am on the morning of December 1, 2010, an FBI search warrant team swarmed up to a Silicon Valley home on an unusual misson: find the "sextortionist" who had been blackmailing pro poker players over the Internet. One agent pounded on the door and shouted out, "FBI!" Movement was heard inside, but no one opened the door. The agent knocked again, but the door stayed shut, so out came the battering ram. Wham—the door gave and FBI agents flooded inside, guns drawn in the dim light.

At the top of the staircase before them stood their target, Keith Hudson. "Show your hands!" demanded one agent. "FBI!" Hudson did not immediately comply; instead, he stepped back from the stairs and said he had to get his daughter. The agents commanded him to stop. Hudson did so, backing down the steps. He was handcuffed when he reached the bottom.

Outside and down the street, the force behind the search warrant was sitting in her car, waiting for the all clear. Special Agent Tanith Rogers had flown up from the FBI's Los Angeles office, where she had spent the last month flying across the country to investigate an online extortion plot. A key agent in the FBI's Cyber Division, Rogers had most of her answers already—the investigation documented in six notebooks stuffed with material—but she wanted Hudson to fill in some of the gaps. And to own up to what he had done.

Rogers entered the home with her partner, Special Agent Karlene Clapp, and the pair made sure that Hudson's three-year old daughter was taken care of before leading Hudson into his daughter's upstairs bedroom.

"I'm harmless," Hudson told them.

"But we're not," Clapp said lightly. It was a joke—sort of.

Hudson's handcuffs were removed; the bedroom door was closed. Hudson sat in a chair facing Clapp and Rogers. Advised that he had the right to remain silent and that he was not under arrest, Hudson nevertheless spoke to the agents. For two hours, the conversation revolved around a simple enough crime: someone had broken into the Hotmail account of professional poker player Joe Sebok and had grabbed copies of sexually explicit images featuring Sebok, which had been stored there as attachments. The mystery man then contacted Sebok repeatedly, demanding wildly varying sums of cash to keep the images under wraps. When Sebok did not comply, the extortionist released a pair of images to key people in the poker community.

“Did I really threaten to kill him?” Hudson asked.

The trail had turned up two sets of IP addresses. One belonged to Hudson, showing that he had looked at the images from within Sebok's Hotmail account. Hudson admitted to what the agents already knew, but he argued that extortion was the furthest thing from his mind; he had been, he said, simply helping out an online acquaintance, a college student and poker fanatic named Tyler Schrier, who had provided the login. Hudson said that Schrier, working from his dorm room in Connecticut, was the real mastermind.

Rogers was contemptuous.

"I am not going to lie to you," she told Hudson as the three spoke in the child's bedroom. "If you want to ask me any questions, I will tell you the truth. Here is what is going on right now: you're being silly. I know that you broke into Joe's account because I can show that your IP did it... So if you're going to lie, that's only going to make you look worse because here is what I have right now. I have three counts of extortion, and—I don't know—five or six counts of intrusion... This is where you get to decide if you want to be a witness or if you want to be a suspect. I know that you're lying because I can prove it."

"OK, I am not trying to lie to you..." Hudson said.

"The FBI does not fly us out here and we don't break into your door to talk to you if we don't have a substantial amount of evidence against you," Rogers said. "If you're going to tell me that some silly child who is in the East Coast and goes to college—who is 20—is the one behind it, I know you're lying."

Hudson, then in his late 30s, insisted it was true. In fact, he said he warned Schrier about what a bad idea blackmailing a pro poker player would be. He had made a screen capture of the images in Sebok's account and e-mailed them to Schrier, he admitted, but not for blackmail. Schrier had told him that his own computer was "too slow" to take the screencaps—Hudson was simply helping out a friend.

As unlikely as this story sounded already, it made even less sense when the agents revealed the other key fact in their possession: they knew that Hudson had urgently been seeking Schrier for weeks. The student had failed to respond to Hudson's increasingly frantic calls and texts and instant messages and e-mails. Hudson had then tracked down Schrier's father and even Schrier's school—apparently getting someone to take a note over to Schrier's dorm room—in his quest to get a response.

Rogers and Clapp suspected the reason for all the communication: Hudson was terrified that Schrier had succeeded in his extortion attempt and was now sitting on $100,000 of cash or more—and that he was going to cut Hudson out of his fair share. Not so, Hudson told the agents; he had simply been concerned about the well-being of his online acquaintance.

Which led the two FBI agents to the next obvious question: if this were true, why had Hudson threatened to kill Schrier if the student didn't return his calls?

"Did I really threaten to kill him?" Hudson asked them.

"Yes, you actually said, 'Why don't you call me so I can tell you how I'll kill you,'" said Clapp, who already had access to the instant messages and e-mails exchanged between the two men.

"Oh wow. Yeah, I guess I was frustrated to be honest... I just wanted to hear from him. You know what I mean?"

"No, I don't," said Rogers.

She clearly didn't believe large portions of what she was hearing from Hudson. As the interview concluded, Rogers provided a rousing peroration. "It's bullshit," she told Hudson about his story. "I know it's bullshit. You know it's bullshit. The judge is gonna know it's bullshit.... Own up to it or take your chances, which is crazy, OK, because we're the Cyber Division of the FBI for Los Angeles. It's the best Cyber Division in the country, and if you're gonna come at me with lies and minimize your part in it, it's just gonna piss me off, and that's what's going on right now."

Hudson realized that the time had come to find himself a lawyer.

The interview concluded and everyone headed back downstairs. As the warrant team left the house with several of Hudson's digital devices in tow, one agent looked back in through the window. Hudson stood at the sink, a picture of domesticity, washing the dishes.